Thursday, September 24, 2015

I took a course in sociology my first
year as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. The course was an introduction to
sociology taught by professor and social activist, Harry Edwards. The course
blew me away because it felt so viscerally real. Professor Edwards would talk
about social class, race, and gender in America and students would chime in
about their own experiences that brought these big social constructs to life.
What I learned in Professor Edwards’ class resembled nothing we had discussed
in my high school history classes—I grew up in a politically conservative
suburb in San Diego, and we didn’t have much ideological diversity in our
discussions of law and society. Sociology, and social sciences more broadly,
really spoke to me.

Thursday, September 3, 2015

I became a parent a year and a half ago, and my life changed
forever. When I was pregnant lots of parents gave me advice (Enjoy going to the
grocery store by yourself while you still can! Go out on dates! Clean your
house!). One even warned me that becoming a parent would “rock my world.” I
thought I understood. I thought I was prepared for the huge change coming. And
while I wasn’t unprepared, I really had no idea exactly how life-changing
becoming a parent would be. Now I try to explain to my friends who don’t have
children what exactly getting swept into parenthood felt like, and the best I
have come up with is this—I had my daughter and she was more wonderful than I
could have imagined, and the rest of my life fell into chaos. One of those
pieces of my life was my relationship with my husband. We look at each other
and marvel that we used to sit around on the weekend and lament that we did not
know what to do with ourselves. Now we would give anything to learn the secret
to freezing time. Now we try to hold on as life rushes by. Now I tell my
husband we need more time and he agrees but asks, “what time?”

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Hello and sorry I've been away from blogging for so long! I ended up switching departments and jobs--now I work at Yale University at the School of Management. As you might imagine, a lot of things have changed as a result of the move. What I'd like to do today is to briefly summarize what stuck out to me as the main differences between teaching undergraduate psychology majors and first year MBAs.

A note of caution before we dive in: I've only spent about 27 hours teaching MBAs and three years teaching psychology undergraduates, so it's possible that I know little to nothing about teaching BOTH groups. Also, the undergraduates and MBAs experienced different courses and come from different universities, so the differences I observed might not reflect MBA/undergrad distinctions. What is reported here is simply one person's observations from a relatively short time period.